# Moreira Salles Institute

The Moreira Salles Institute (Portuguese: Instituto Moreira Salles, IMS) is a Brazilian nonprofit organization founded by diplomat and banker Walter Moreira Salles in 1992, with the establishment of its first cultural center in the city of Poços de Caldas, Minas Gerais. Later, the institute expanded its operations to São Paulo (1996), in a mansion located in the Higienópolis neighborhood, and to Rio de Janeiro (1999), in a former Moreira Salles family residence, built in 1951 with architectural design by Olavo Redig de Campos and landscaping by Burle Marx. It is managed by the Moreira Salles family and is exclusively dedicated to the promotion, collection development, and implementation of cultural programs in the fields of photography, literature, iconography, visual arts, music, and cinema.
Part of its collections in these areas is available for public onsultation on the institute's website as well as in its cultural centers. The institute also operates online radio channels and publishes various materials, such as exhibition catalogs, books on literature, photography, and music, and two magazines: Zum (a semiannual publication on contemporary photography from Brazil and around the world) and Serrote (a quarterly magazine focused on essays and ideas). Since 2019, the institute has contributed with part of its collection in the public domain to Wikimedia Commons.

## Units
### Poços de Caldas

The city of Poços de Caldas in Minas Gerais became home to IMS's first cultural center in 1992, a decision made by diplomat Walter Moreira Salles as a tribute to the region where his family settled in 1918.

### Rio de Janeiro

Inaugurated in October 1999, in the Gávea neighborhood, IMS Rio is located in the house where Walter Moreira Salles and his family lived from the late 1940s. It hosts exhibitions, films, and concerts, in addition to housing extensive collections of photography, music, literature, and iconography. The house itself, designed by Olavo Redig de Campos, is a landmark of 1950s Brazilian modernist architecture, featuring gardens by Burle Marx.

### São Paulo

Since 2017, the newest IMS headquarters is located in São Paulo, occupying 6,000 square meters at Paulista Avenue, 2424. Designed by the architectural firm Andrade Morettin, the building was inaugurated on 20 September 2017 after six years of construction, at an approximate cost of R$150 million. Spanning nine floors, the building includes three exhibition halls, a 150-seat cinetheater, a study space, three classrooms for lectures and courses, a café, and a restaurant led by Rodrigo Oliveira. It also hosts the monumental work ECHO by Richard Serra, installed in January 2019, the only sculpture by the artist in South America.

## Photographic collection

IMS has a prominent role in the field of photography, focusing on the formation of collections and the preservation of rare sets that address topics related to the Brazil's memory, history, communications, and visual arts. The photographic collection began in 1995 with acquisitions of 19th-century images. Subsequently, the institute obtained the collection of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss from the 1930s.
Currently, the collection comprises around 2 million images by photographers such as Augusto Malta, Alberto Henschel, Albert Frisch, Alécio de Andrade, Alice Brill, Augusto Stahl, Carlos Moskovics, Chico Albuquerque, Claude Lévi-Strauss, David Drew Zingg, Domingos de Miranda Ribeiro, Dulce Soares, Francisco du Bocage, Georg Leuzinger, Guilherme Gaensly, Guilherme Santos, Hans Gunter Flieg, Haruo Ohara, Henri Ballot, Hércules Florence, Hildegard Rosenthal, Horacio Coppola, José Medeiros, Juca Martins, Lily Sverner, Luciano Carneiro, Madalena Schwartz, Marc Ferrez, Marcel Gautherot, Martín Chambi, Maureen Bisilliat, Militão Augusto de Azevedo, Otto Stupakoff, Peter Scheier, Revert Henrique Klumb, Rossini Perez, Stefania Bril, Thomaz Farkas, and Vincenzo Pastore.
In 2016, the IMS acquired the photographic archive of the Diários Associados group, which, throughout the 20th century, under the leadership of Assis Chateaubriand, was one of the largest media conglomerates in Brazil. This acquisition included the photographic collections of Rio de Janeiro newspapers such as O Jornal (founded in 1919), Diário da Noite (1929), and Jornal do Commercio, a newspaper that began in 1827, was incorporated into Diários Associados in 1957, and ceased publication in April 2016.
At the new IMS location on Paulista Avenue, the institution will also house a library entirely dedicated to photography, with a capacity for up to 30,000 items.

## Gallery

* IMS Poços de Caldas
* IMS Rio de Janeiro
* IMS São Paulo
* IMS São Paulo's library